Extracting data from the web Part 2

Description

The internet is a treasure trove of data, if you know how to collect it. In this two part series of webinars, we will examine easy ways to collect different types of data from the web with R.

In Part 2 we will use the rvest package to extract data that is not provided through an API from the web. How do you collect data that the web developer hasn’t packaged nicely in an API for your consumption? By searching for the data in the page’s HTML structure and extracting it in a surgical way. The rvest package contains several tools that make this process easy and automatable. We will examine these tools along with the background knowledge of HTML and CSS that they depend on.